April 26, 2010

Evelyn Cheesman, Biologist and Eyewitness

Modern living pterosaurs were the last organisms that she would have dreamed could be living deep in the mainland of New Guinea in the 1930's; her specialty was small insects, not giant cryptids. But those strange lights just above the forest canopy---they appeared to defy any common explanation. They could not be made by natives, for how could many natives have coordinated the flashes or lined themselves up horizontally (for a long distance on that mountain ridge) to turn on and off their flashlights in that pattern, even if there were some purpose for all that trouble?

Lucy Evelyn Cheesman (1881 – 1969), British biologist and explorer, never did arrive at any satisfactory explanation; the natives would not explain the lights to her. She would have been shocked at the research done in more recent years, for those lights are seen in other areas of Papua New Guinea and they are now ascribed to the bioluminescent glow of giant living pterosaurs.